Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute evening session, Ven Margaret McAndrew explores the precious human rebirth—a foundational Graduated Path topic—with unusual depth, anchoring the teaching in stories like the golden shanty. She walks through the core meditation: understanding the rarity and usability of a human life with freedom and opportunity to practice Dharma. She covers the eight freedoms—freedom from eight states incompatible with practice: hells, hungry ghosts, animals, and long-life gods of the form and formless realms, plus four human obstacles—being born as a barbarian, where Buddha has not manifested, with crippling disability, or attached to wrong views. She illustrates with the story of Nanda, whom Buddha inspired to practice by revealing visions of celestial goddesses. Q&A follows. For practitioners with some Buddhist foundation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 33 PHR 1998 06 04.mp3
UUID: 45034535-1659-4e2c-9b85-7b953ead7a11
Teacher: Ven Margaret McAndrew
Collection: Evening with V M McAndrew (Ven Margaret McAndrew)
Date: 1998-06-04
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.4 minutes
Words: ~6,450
So you might be a bit relieved to hear that I planned for a rather short talk tonight because I had an idea we’d probably be a little bit over time with the Puja. So I’m sorry anyway that we weren’t quite ready to start on time. So looking at the Graduated Path teachings over the last few months, we’ve been going through Graduated Path teachings and I went through a lot of the topics and then we got to the end of the round of the Graduated Path teachings and started again. So I went through some of the preliminary topics in the last few weeks. Last week we looked at the life story of Atisha and how he came to compose The Lamp of the Path, which was the basic graduated path teaching that was really the stimulus for all the other graduated path teachings that have been composed since then.
There’s also some of the more elaborate graduated path texts, for instance, Liberation in the Palm of the Hand, at the beginning have quite an extensive section on the preliminary practices. That includes things like how to set up your altar and how to offer water bowls and how to set up your seat and how to sit correctly and visualise the Merit Field and all of these things. We went through all that in quite a lot of detail recently in some Saturday workshops. I haven’t been doing it on the Thursday nights, but we went through that on the Saturday workshops. So, I’m not going to go through that tonight, but these practices are very important if we want to get results in our meditation.
Liberation in the Palm of your Hand is set up in terms of how to meditate on the Graduated Path. It’s not just explaining the Graduated Path, it’s explaining how to meditate on it. It’s assuming that you’re going to do a meditation session and you’re going to do all the things that have to be done in a meditation session, and that not only includes the Graduated Path Meditation itself, but things that lead up to it, involving the merit field and making offerings to the merit field in order to gain merit so as to be able to meditate, because we need to accumulate merit. In order to be able to meditate on the graduated path, we have to not only just sit there and sort of try to put our minds onto the meditation, but we also need some merit, we need an accumulation of merit and in order to get realizations we’re going to need a lot of merit and all these other practices like offering water bowls, offering mandala offerings, prostrations and so on, are all very important for the accumulation of merit and the purification of obstacles. We have a lot of obstacles on our minds, these obstacles are from our negative karmas, Apart from the bad result that can be brought in terms of having to experience a suffering result, we also find that these negative karmas obscure us, so that we can’t understand the teachings, and so it’s important to purify these.
That’s the reason for having all these preliminaries. The ones that we’ve just gone through now, taking refuge and bodhicitta, and seven-limb prayer and the mandala offering are a very condensed form of these preliminaries. That’s why we do those at the beginning of every practice that we do. Having done these preliminaries, then it’s time to actually meditate on the graduated path. Now we’re actually getting into the topic of what we have to do in order to be led on the path.
Before, we also talked about Guru devotion, devoting yourself to the spiritual guide. Now we’re getting to the point of how the spiritual guide guides you on the path. The first topic is looking at the precious human rebirth or the perfect human rebirth or the fully endowed human rebirth. There’s a lot of different translations for that term. First of all, there’s the question of identifying it and then we have to look at its usefulness and its rarity.
Actually, in a sense, this topic also comes into the preliminaries because it’s not really counted as being one of the three scopes. Sometimes it’s lumped together with the small scope, but it’s really a preliminary to the small scope topics. We have this topic: How to extract the essence from your precious human rebirth. After having identified your precious human rebirth and having considered its rarity and how difficult it is to obtain, then you look at how to extract the essence from it and that leads onto the small scope topics, which is looking at death and impermanence and the suffering of the lower states of rebirth and looking at taking refuge and karma and in that way avoiding lower rebirth. So what we’re going to look at tonight anyway is this topic of the perfect human rebirth.
And I didn’t go into this in much detail before, and we have a bit of a tendency sometimes to skip over some of these topics very quickly, because it tends to include some topics that we find a little bit awkward, sometimes have to present to very new people. So we tend to skip over them things like the suffering of the lower realms and the hell states and all these things and the topic of reincarnation of death and rebirth you have to really consider it fairly seriously if you’re going to really fully take this topic as it’s explained in the Graduated Path teachings. And so there’s quite a number of details of this sort. Sometimes, when we’re presenting it, it’s the first topic that comes in the Graduated Path. If you’re talking to new people, you tend to perhaps go over some of these things rather quickly, so as to give people a little bit of time to adjust to them and to think about them themselves rather than landing them with too much that they might find difficult to accept right in the beginning you want them to hear some of the good stuff that they’re going to like before you land them with too much of the stuff that they’re not going to find so comfortable, you know what I mean?
So, anyway, I thought having been through this all before and seeing that most of you are old hands at this stage and you’ve heard all this stuff before perhaps I’ll go into it in a bit more detail tonight and if there’s anybody who hasn’t heard all this sort of stuff before then my apologies but just take it, you know, just take it easily and don’t worry too much but just just take it easy and give yourself time to think about it. So, to look at these things in more detail, actually, of course, also when we’re looking at the small scope meditations we have to keep in mind that we’re not just first of all going to practice small scope and then we’re going to practice intermediate scope and then we’re going to practice great scope. What we try to do is to try to bring all the scopes together into our practice. But for most of us, we can see that for most of us, main practice has to be the things that come in the small scope section, and that is particularly taking refuge in the Three Jewels with understanding and observing karma. Then the medium scope or the intermediate scope is concerned with trying very intensively to attain the mind of renunciation of saṃsāra.
And the Mahāyāna scope is concerned with very intensively trying to attain great love and compassion and the thought of attaining enlightenment for the sake of all. And those are involved with practices of trying to go on and achieve the cessation of suffering and to achieve full Buddhahood. But for most of us, we might not be able to achieve the higher meditative states and so on in this life, although it’s very helpful to start to study these things and to do as much practice as we can. But we all can do the practice of observing karma, and so we need to bring all of these scopes into our practice. Although we might only be doing the practice of observing karma, avoiding wrong actions and trying to accumulate merit, we can be doing it with a Mahāyāna motivation as we get motivated at the beginning of the session.
Every day, first thing in the morning, we can be setting our motivation for bodhicitta at the end of the day dedicating our merits again in the same way for enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings and in this way even though we might only be doing the practice of observing karma and a few other simple practices it all becomes Mahāyāna practice because we’re doing it with the bodhicitta motivation and with that long term aim of working towards Buddhahood. Looking at the perfect human rebirth teachings, Pabongka Rinpoche says that even if our hearthstones are made of gold, if we don’t know it, then we’ll still be a pauper. That reminds me of a story that we used to study in school. Do you remember that? We always used to have to study it in English.
The older generation, I’m sure, all know it. It was a story by some Australian writer of the early days about a chap who had a shanty made of mud bricks that had gold in them. Do you remember that one? Yeah. What was it called?
Who was the author? Was one of those Vanderpest and all of that fun stuff. Yeah, of those old authors. Yes, it wasn’t Henry Lawson, it was too humorous, too light hearted for Henry Lawson. Anyway, the whole thing was that chap, were some Chinese diggers nearby and of course the Australian diggers, the white diggers, used to despise the Chinese diggers.
This chap had a sly grog shanty, and the Chinese were always running off with his mud bricks from his shanty, and he couldn’t work out why. He must have been pretty dim, because it took him a long time to work out that the Chinese were actually panning these bricks to get the gold out of them. Anyway, he was in that situation. He was a poor man until he realized that he had a it was called the golden shanty. That was the name of it.
So anyway, this is that just occurred to me now, but this is an example of how when we can identify our treasure, then we can make use of it. If we can’t identify it, then we can’t make use of it. Anyway, in order to identify it, it’s not just enough to be told once that you’ve got a precious human rebirth, but you have to really think about it. You have to consider all the qualities that it does bring us. And we have to keep on reflecting and meditating on it, and really get a strong feeling for it.
So anyway, if you find anything in these teachings that might seem a little bit uncomfortable for you and that doesn’t make sense yet, just just take it easy and keep an open mind about it and think about it and just take time to think about it and accept what seems good now and just think about the rest slowly. So it’s explained in terms of having eight freedoms and ten endowments. And the eight freedoms involve four nonhuman states and four states as human beings. And we’re free from these eight non human states and these eight states as human beings that are states that would have prevented our practicing Dharma if we’d been born into them this time around. We’ve actually been born into these states many, many times in the path, countless times in the path, and we want to avoid being born in these states in the future.
Because, apart from the fact that these states, some of them are very undesirable in themselves, some of them are quite agreeable in themselves, but they’re undesirable from the point of view of Dharma practice. They’re simply not states that are conducive to the practice of Dharma. So, the first one that we want to avoid is the hell states, and it’s explained in teachings that there are many beings in these hell states, in fact, more sentient beings in the hell states than anywhere else. And there are eight hot and eight cold hells, and there are also some others, so you’ve got plenty of choice. But there’s probably lots of jokes, some the joke tellers can probably tell a few jokes about how we have a choice too I heard one recently, can’t remember the details, it was sort of like a joke that you sort of had a choice of which one you went to but there was a catch in it, you know, whatever it looked like, it wasn’t as good as it appeared at first sight.
So anyway, these are all very suffering states. And they’re places where we want to avoid going there at any cost. And I won’t go into lot of details about the sufferings, but if you’ve heard other descriptions of hells in other religions, they’re pretty much standard for the hot hells. You’ve got the fire, the burning grounds, and the guards with heads like animals and all sorts of gruesome torches. I don’t know whether you need to take these literally or whether it’s simply a case of understanding that in these states it’s a state of gross physical suffering.
These states are created by our minds, by our karma. If you think that’s impossible, that these states could exist, well, you should think that this world we’re living in now is also created by our mind, by our karma, And the beings who’ve done very bad things, who have created a lot of heavy bad karma, have this kind of world created for them in that particular rebirth. And they get stuck there for that particular lifetime. It might be that these things aren’t possible in a world that follows the physical rules of this world we’re in now, but there are other worlds that could be following different physical rules. It all comes back to being a creation of mind, but the suffering is very gross, very physical.
And then there are the hungry ghosts. At least some of these hungry ghosts actually do share our world and you’ll be seen by clairvoyant people. Their world is also a very unsuitable one for the practice of Dharma. They have a lot of sufferings. They’re always suffering from hunger, thirst, various physical pains, and they’re constantly craving.
They’re under the influence of craving. In these realms, it’s impossible for the beings to to have any leisure for Dharma practice, because they’re experiencing suffering all the time. If we think how difficult it is for us to meditate, if we’re even experiencing some sort of small pain, such as a pain in our limbs, or if you imagine what it’s like if you were to hold a stick of burning incense against your skin, you wouldn’t be able to concentrate even for a moment. Yes. Think this is a good example.
Yes. It’s that sort of craving for something all the time that drives people into drugs and alcoholism. That’s the sort of thing that the hungry ghosts are experiencing. It could be, yes, that people who abuse drugs and other substances are probably creating the cause for that sort of a rebirth, and they’re certainly experiencing a lot of suffering in this lifetime. Could be We’ve had all these kinds of rebirths before and we’ve been fortunate enough to get out of this now.
So we want to really build on that and to not go back into these sort of states. The third one is animals, and we also don’t want to be born in the animal state. We might think that perhaps some animals have a good life, like this cat here, but she’s under the influence of ignorance. She’s a good example because she sits in here at the teachings and hears all sorts of Dharma words, but she can’t put any of it into action and she can’t even say a mantra. Fortunately, think she spends more time sleeping than hunting, But you can imagine that a lot of cats like the black cat Jack who lives just up the road and spends a lot of time in our backyard is always hanging out for the pigeons.
And so you could talk dharma to him, but he simply wouldn’t understand, and then he’d just go and kill another pigeon. And there’s no way he doesn’t need to, you know, because he gets well fed, but he he it’s his instinct to hunt. And this is just part of his nature of his animal rebirth. And they also have various sufferings of fear and hunger and sickness and heat and cold and be Fighting. Fighting.
Well, right, they were fighting again, yes, fighting each other, competition and so on. They have all these sufferings. human beings have these kinds of sufferings too sometimes. Animals are very subject to these sufferings. So, if we’re born as an animal, we don’t have an opportunity to practice Dharma.
Was thinking, you know, I love watching the Big Cat Diary, and seeing what all the cheetahs and leopards and so on are doing. You can get very attached to these animals, but you have to be careful that you don’t think of one to be born as one. The fourth one is the long life gods. We might think that sounds alright. What’s wrong with being a god?
Has anybody been thinking that? Might probably might not occur to us very much, but if if it occurs to us, if we could get born as gods, then it might seem irresistible, you know, because it’s a very nice rebirth to have. And the long life, you might think, why can’t the gods practice Dharma? Well, it particularly mentions the long life gods here, and that refers not to all gods, but to the gods of the form and formless realms. Some of you might have heard this explanation about the gods before.
There are three levels of gods. There are the gods of the desire realm, and then there are the gods of the Formless Realm. So, we’re in the Desire Realm, and all these other beings are in the Desire Realm, from the hells, the hungry ghosts, the animals, the human beings, and then there are the demigods, or the asuras, and then there are the gods, or the gods of the desire realm, who are also in this, what’s called the desire realm. And then, beyond that, you have the form realms, where the gods have a very subtle kind of form, they have very subtle bodies, and they spend their whole life in meditation. So you have four form realms and four formless realms.
The gods in these eight realms, the four form and the four formless realms, have tremendously long lives, and they spend those lives completely engrossed in meditative absorption. The only conceptual thoughts they have is when they first get born there, and they have the thought, Oh, I’ve been born in this particular realm, and then they enter straight into the meditative absorption of that realm, and they remain in it for eons and eons, but eventually they’ve used up their karma to remain in that realm because they so it’s actually very it’s quite a complicated explanation during that realm during their life in that realm the God in the first form realm is creating the karma to be born in the second form realm, because they’re creating the karma of the second form realm absorptions and so when they die, they go to the second form realm, and then they go from the second form realm to the third form realm and then the fourth and then they go into the formless realms and finally when they get up to the eighth realm, the fourth formless realm they’re in this eighth absorption which is so subtle that they’re not creating any karma at all while they’re there they’re just using up the karma that they created in the seventh realm and when they get to the end of that life they’ve got no more karma to stay in the the God realms and so they get reborn as an animal or a human being or something that to them is absolutely horrible mainly they get born as animals because they’ve been really practicing a form of ignorance in these realms so when they get born they go back to some sort of life such as a pig and so it’s a dead end, you know, they have this wonderful time this very blissful meditation Yes, exactly.
And when they realize that they’re getting born in the animal realm, they experience absolute horror because they thought they were liberated. To the extent that they can have any thought at all, they think that they’re liberated while they’re in this eighth state this very very subtle fourth formless realm that it doesn’t lead anywhere and so they just come down from that and they’re back into the old circle again. Many Hindu Yogis in the past have made the mistake of thinking that this is the I’m not talking about any Hindu Gurus who might be existing now, but I’m just talking about in the past Buddha’s time, there were many Hindu yogis who mistook various of these realms for liberation. In their meditations, they would experience these realms, these absorptions. So, it doesn’t lead anywhere.
And this is what Buddha found, actually. He found that the teachers he went to first had mistaken various of these states for liberation. And he found that they were not liberation, and he found how to find the true cessation. So there are also the Asura realms, the demigod realms, where the beings have bodies and some things that are similar to what we would find in our world among the well-to-do, as beautiful palaces and gardens and swimming pools and lots of good friends and music and all sorts of enjoyments. The asuras are very jealous and warlike and they’re always fighting so they have various sufferings such as fighting and being killed and they also don’t have much interest in the dharma and they don’t have venerate the Dharma.
You go to the Desire Realm gods, the Devas of the Desire Realm, there are various levels of those too. They also have these things even better than the asuras they have better palaces, better jewels, more beautiful girlfriends and boyfriends, more refined pleasures. Desire Realm gods apparently enjoy all the bliss of sexual intercourse by just looking at each other or just holding hands and so on so their pleasures are not gross like they are in the human realms they’re very, very refined and sort of subtle and delicate and they have, you know, beautiful clothes and garments and perfumes and the most wonderful celestial music and so on and the only time that they suffer is at the end of their life when they for seven days, I think it is of their world, which is a tremendously long time in human terms, they realize that they’re dying and their body fades and they start to have perspiration and smells and aches and pains and all these things that they never had before and their friends won’t come near them anymore because they suddenly become a disgusting object it’s quite a shock to their friends when they see this happen because they’ve never imagined anything like this and so this is a terrible time of suffering for them.
During their lifetime, they have certain instincts for virtue, which is why they got there in the first place, but they just don’t have any interest or leisure for Dharma practice because they’re having such a good time. And there’s a story that’s told to illustrate that, that one of Buddha’s great disciples, Śāriputra, had a disciple of his own who was a well known doctor of the time and very rich and used to ride around on an elephant and this disciple, whenever he saw Śāriputra, would immediately, without even waiting to get down slowly from his elephant, he was just jumped down off his elephant so as to make prostrations to Śāriputra and so he had great devotion to Śāriputra and so when he died he was reborn in this God realm and Śāriputra thought that he would go there and teach him Dharma he obviously died before he had time to really put the Dhamma into very much practice and so he couldn’t continue he wasn’t born in a suitable situation to continue with his Dhamma practice, but Śāriputra thought he had great psychic powers, would go there and teach him, and so he went there and found his former disciple and his former disciple saw him and simply waved to him and went on with his pleasures.
So that was unfortunate. But anyway, the point is that if we get reborn in these states, we’re not going to be able to, put the Dharma teachings into practice. We contemplate how fortunate we are that we haven’t been born into any of these realms, we’ve been born into this human life and yes, you wouldn’t want to be there, wouldn’t really want to have a taste it or you’d never stop. Actually, that can be useful too. There’s a story of Buddha, one of his disciples, Nanda have you heard of Nanda?
Not Ānanda, but Nanda. Nanda was very attached to his wife and to all the other pleasures of the human life. Buddha wanted him to be his I think he was Buddha’s cousin. Buddha wanted him to be his disciple, and he saw that he had some karma for that. But Nanda didn’t want this at all, and so Buddha somehow tricked him into coming along and getting his head shaved.
Nanda accepted it for a little while, but he kept on thinking of his fiancee. He was engaged to one of the most beautiful girls, engaged or married, I can’t remember which, but Buddha saw that Nanda really had the quality to become an Arhat, so he insisted that Nanda had to join his Sangha. You might think that was a bit tough of Buddha, but really Buddha could see that this was for Nanda’s good and far better for Nanda. Nanda tried to practice, but he kept on thinking and thinking about fiancee. And finally, Buddha said, if if you had a choice between between your wife and a female monkey with its nose slit, which would you think was the most beautiful?
And Nanda said, Oh, of course, my fiancee is the most beautiful woman that ever was. How could you possibly compare her to a monkey with a slit nose? And so then Buddha created a magical vision of these God realms and showed none of these beautiful goddesses of the Desire Realm and he managed to overhear a conversation. And the there were two apparently, these gods get born out of lotus buds or something, and there were two no. No.
Sorry. That’s a little bit more confused. That there were anyway, there were a two there was a beautiful palace, and there was an oh, that’s right. There were two empty thrones in it, I think. And somebody was saying, well, who are these empty thrones for?
And they were saying, for the sons of our family who are going to born into our family to occupy this place. And this Nanda is going to be one of them if he practices hard but on the other hand if he gets lazy and goes back to his family again then he’s not going to make it And so then, Nanda had seen that vision and saw these beautiful goddesses, then when he came back to the awareness of the human world, he realised that compared to these beautiful goddesses, his beautiful fiancee was no more attractive than a monkey with a slit nose. And so he was really focused on being born into these god realms, where he could be born to be married to one of these beautiful Goddesses and so he really practiced very very hard and of course after he’d been practicing for a while he began to realize and all the other monks used to say Nanda, you know it’s not good enough, you’re practicing. This is really inferior to be practicing just to be born in the God realms. You really should set your sights on liberation.
Gradually, as he practiced, he had less attachment, he gradually began to set his sights on liberation, and he really did achieve great progress after that well she was probably lucky to get rid of him too. Yes. I’m sure. So then There are also four states that we have to be free from in the human world so as to be able to practice Dharma. These are being born as a barbarian.
We were official barbarians until a few years ago. This used to rather amuse me. The definition of a central country is one where there are, at least in this degenerate age, least for fully ordained sangha. And so Australia wasn’t in this category. I’m not sure whether it is at the moment, but I think if you counted everybody up, you probably would find four fully ordained beings in Australia at the moment.
But I used to think, well, that’s very interesting, you know, because my parents and their generation probably would have regarded the Tibetans as barbarians, but it would have been quite surprising then to know that the Tibetans regarded them as barbarians. And we did fall into that definition that we were very remote from any Dharma that was being taught, but I think nowadays, really, the whole world is so easily reached by aeroplanes and so on that really anybody has access to the teachings if they’re in a country where they’re free to travel. Perhaps some countries where the people are not allowed to leave the country and where they’re very much oppressed and where they are very rigid governments and so on, perhaps some of these countries might still be considered barbarian or perhaps countries where the bulk of the people are so poor that they have no opportunity to travel to where the dharma exists and where the dharma doesn’t exist in that country. So you could perhaps still say that there are some people who could be considered in this world to fall into that category. That’s a little bit of a questionable point the moment, little bit of a debatable point.
Certainly, in the path, there were countries where, for geographical reasons, you simply had no opportunity of meeting the Dharma teachings. The second one is where Buddha hasn’t come. And so this particularly refers, I think, in the old idea of Mount Meru and the four continents, a world consists of these four continents around Mount Meru and that there are human beings on some of these continents but Buddhas don’t go to all of those continents they particularly come to this one the southern continent and also you could think that there are probably other in this galaxy or in other galaxies, there are probably other worlds where there are living beings that perhaps might not have the benefit of receiving teachings from a Buddha. So in this world also, there are long periods of time where there are no Buddhas. In this world age, we’re having a thousand But in between each Buddha, there’s a long period of time in which the teachings of the previous Buddha ceased to exist and there is no more Dharma path accessible to the beings at that time until the next Buddha manifests.
And after Śākyamūni Buddha’s teachings have ceased to exist in this world, then there will be a long period. They say that during this age, the beings’ lifespans are going to become very short and the beings are going to become very, very degenerate and then there’s going to be another period of regeneration where the beings’ lifespans and their personal qualities and so on will become much greater and this will go on for eons until they reach a very very long lifespan and then there will eventually be a gradually gradual degeneration again and again when the beings reach the stage where their lifespan’s around about a hundred years or something then Maitreya Buddha will come and restore the Dharma teachings. Śākyamūni Buddha is the fourth and Maitreya will be the fifth so there’s going to be a thousand but still the period of time in which the teachings are flourishing is very short compared to the time in which there are no teachings. Okay. So another one is that yes, if you think of it, you can ask me later.
Another one is that even if we are born in a central place, we could have been born with some sort of disability that would keep us from being able to understand and put the teachings into practice. So we could be born into a central place, but disabilities such as mental disability, various some kinds of physical disabilities, particularly deafness gets mentioned in the scriptures because up until the modern age deafness was something that would keep people from having contact with the Dharma teachings. Even nowadays, deafness is quite a big obstacle to overcome, particularly the deaf person can’t hear the voice of the teacher. Maybe some people are able to use hearing aids and so on, but the people who rely on the Deaf language, sign language, would not be able to hear the voice, wouldn’t be able to receive the oral transmission of the hearing so it would be that much harder for them to really receive the Dharma inspiration and to put it into practice. In previous times, deaf people were simply totally cut off.
They were not really able to receive communication effectively at all. And we can still see there are many particularly mental disabilities, sort of retardation or people some some people who have like what’s the proper word? No, you can’t say they’re crazy anymore. Pardon? Well, not only schizophrenia, but any sort of form of madness, I suppose you can say.
I suppose it’s not proper to say mad, but if you’re mad or whatever, then I know there’s some people who have been you might say rather mad or rather crazy, but they have been quite capable of understanding the benefit of Dharma. So you can’t say that’s an absolute thing, but really if it’s bad enough then it’s going to stop people from understanding the Dharma teachings because then they sort of take it the wrong way and misinterpret, even if they hear the teachings they misinterpret them I’m not putting down people who’ve got mental illnesses, because I’ve known people with mental illnesses who’ve really, I think, understood the, at least the basic meaning of dharma a lot better than some people who were supposedly sane, but who, perhaps because they hadn’t been through the suffering that these people had been through, they didn’t sort of receive the messages clearly, whereas some of these people who had been through a lot of mental illness, they’ve been through so much suffering that they, when they heard the Dharma teachings, they really understood the message. And sometimes it can be very helpful for these people, when they do meet the Dharma, that they are able to practice it.
But, anyway, it can be a big drawback to be able to practice the Dharma if you have these problems. And the fourth one is wrong views. And this is the greatest hindrance because while we’re holding to wrong views and while we’re attached to our wrong views, there’s no way that we can benefit from the teachings. Even if Śākyamūni Buddha was right here in front of us teaching us, if we held fast to wrong views, then we’d gain no benefit from that. And, in fact, there were people in Buddha’s time who did see Buddha and hear his words and couldn’t accept them because they were attached to their own particular point of view.
So anyway, any questions about what we’ve been through so far? Well oh, yes. So you’re worried that we might not yes. Well, I used to worry about this a lot when I first met the teachers. I used to worry terribly that I might get bored in this world when there were no more teachings, and what would we do then?
So we asked Lama Yeshe about that, and Lama Yeshe said we shouldn’t worry because there are so many other worlds that we could be born into. If we have the karma for it, then we’ll be born into a world where there are Buddhist teachings, Dharma teachings. So there are all these other worlds, and we could be born into some of them. It’s quite possible. Once we die, once we’re in the Bardo, once we’re in the in between state, we’re not limited by space and physical matter, so we can go anywhere in a flash.
These beings have very, very subtle bodies that can go anywhere in the universe in a flash, and so we could go to some other planet. This this one is not going to be such a good one for very long, actually. Okay. What do some of you people have to say to that? Well, it can be done in three.
I think it can be a bit less than that. I think three months if if they have all the conditions. But, anyway, calm abiding, of course, in order to gain the total realization, but once we get calm abiding, we’re getting very close to the to getting all these things, you know, all the realizations, bodhicitta, everything. But I think you’re talking more about on the everyday level, aren’t you?